"The saliva that they leave behind might make you itchy, or if you are really unlucky, you might die".

If you are like me and seem to attract these buzzing beasts you will enjoy this book, although bear in mind it is rather technical and written mainly for the scientifically minded.

Some useful information includes:

-carbon dioxide and heat attracts them, (but it doesn't seem to be explained here why they seem to like some people more than others, or whether it is just that some people react to bites more than others),
-various species attack different parts of the body (eg some the ankles, some the head),
-some don't attack humans at all,
-some attack only humans and monkeys,
-colours vary-some are black and white striped, (these cause yellow fever), others are brown, others dominantly grey.
-the mosquito has had a significant effect on human history through various mosquito borne diseases (eg Dengue, Yellow Fever, Malaria, Encephalitus, and Rift Valley Fever).
-various mosquito-borne diseases are exclusive to birds, some cross from birds to man, some from horses to man, some from monkeys to man, etc.

Some historical plagues and the diseases transmitted by mosquitoes are described eg Dengue, Yellow Fever, Malaria , Encephalitus, and Rift Valley Fever. Historically, it was initially ridiculed that tiny organisms could carry tiny diseases, but careful observation and scientific method eventually won the day over 'folk psychology'. Mosquitoes, through recognition of their association with yellow fever and malaria, played a major part in the development of germ theory, and by association much of modern medicine. Pasteur's germ theory, partially based on work done on mosquitoes as disease carriers, contributed much to humankind's better general health in the latter 19th century in particular. Good sanitation and community health went hand in hand with ongoing scientific research, including that done on mosquito-borne diseases.

Sanitation has been surprisingly effective against mosquito-borne diseases. Limiting stagnant water and widespread use of household netting has been proven to greatly reduce disease rates. The presence of marshes and wetlands increases prevalence, but so does the presence of the longer- lived and more aggressive species (Incidentally, Alaska has amongst the most aggressive mossies of all-which anyone who has been there in the summer will tell you).

A useful read, scientifically astute, but perhaps a little dry, along with most other medical-style texts I have read. Worthwhile.

What animal presents the greatest danger to humans? With our predilection for blood and guts (and scary movies) we are likely to answer sharks, or lions and tigers and bears. This is wrong by a factor of millions. You yourself have hunted, and sometimes killed this most dangerous animal, but most of the time it has attacked you in stealth and escaped to attack again. It is the tiny mosquito that endangers us far more than the big, scary beasts. They caused 500 million cases of malaria last year, and a million deaths from it, and that's just malaria. We can swat a few, but for all our knowledge, large-scale control of the scourge eludes us. Just how big a problem mosquitoes pose is made clear in _Mosquito: A Natural History of Our Most Persistent and Deadly Foe_ by Andrew Spielman and Michael D'Antonio. A good deal of the book is told in the first person, for Spielman is a tropical disease specialist and a particular expert on mosquitoes and the diseases they transmit. (He has been bitten so many times he no longer gets welts.) D'Antonio is a journalist who has won a Pulitzer. The combination of the two has resulted in a surprisingly readable, scary, and humbling volume.

The first section of the book is entitled "The Magnificent Enemy." It is clear that Spielman, after decades of trying to understand mosquitoes and battling them, holds them in admiration as finely tuned specimens produced by the pressures of evolution. (He is also able to refer to them as "the little devils" when they turn up where they are not wanted.) You knew that only females draw blood (this is to produce the eggs of the next generation), but did you know that they mostly eat rotting fruit? Much of the book is concerned with the illnesses that mosquitoes convey, and the symptoms make unpleasant reading. Mosquitoes have changed history, and many instances are included here. DDT saw wartime use in the WWII Pacific, and scientists thought we could have eradicated mosquitoes by now, but here are the war's results: "Today, a map colored to illustrate the worldwide distribution of malaria does not look much different from one drawn in 1955." The authors argue against the ban of DDT which various ecological groups are calling for. It is no longer dangerously overused, it is cheap, and it saves lives. It can't work very well if we keep transporting mosquitoes to new populations, as international travel is making it easier to do.

The book gives a useful summary of what works against mosquitoes and what doesn't. Repellants work, especially those with DEET, as does any oily substance spread on the skin. Screens are one of the main ways malaria was expelled from the United States. Bug zappers kill very few mosquitoes; ultrasonic devices do nothing; and sadly, culturing bats and mosquito-eating birds seems to have little effect. We are, for all our knowledge, making little headway against this tiny, dangerous enemy. This book effectively sums up the problems, and in an entertaining way brings us up to date on an important war we are far from winning.

This is fun book about a subject that everybody hates. Nobody likes mosquitos, they are annoying little beasts and some of them may just kill you. The book starts with a summary of how mosquitos live and reproduce. The only complaint that I have is that I wish this section was a little longer. I would have liked it if the book went into a bit more detail about the diversity of mosquitos. I liked the way the book described the influences that mosquitos have had through history. The sections about yellow fever and malaria are informative. I really enjoyed this book. It does give you a good feel for how these little terrors are dealt with. The books is a fast read and it keeps your interest. If you travel or have an interest in mosquitos, this would be a good read.

I really don't know how the previous 5 reviews gave this book 5 stars. I was really excited about this book when I first read the reviews, and now here I am only a few chapters in and already thinking about dumping it altogether. This book has so many flaws for its size, the biggest of which was the codes. I am no Perl expert, but could find my way around in a decent size program. However, no examples I have tried so far in the book actually worked, and some of these are just 10-20 lines long. I am completely new to LWP, I guess like anyone who would buy this book, so it's hard for me to see what the author is doing. The explanation of the code didn't help much either. As oppose to explaining the steps, he just said "the code below does this". And it's pretty obvious little or no editing has gone into this book. If you do buy this book, you'll probably want to make a trip to the Errata page at the Oreilly website. The amount of typos, printing errors, warnings and grammatical mistakes found by readers and editors listed on this page rivals the usuable content of the book itself. You know what, I have spent way too much on this book already.....

If you are unfamiliar with LWP and web scraping, or HTML parsing using tokens and trees, I strongly recommend this book. It's the best *introduction* to these topics I've been able to find. Sean's style is clear and concise-just what I expect from an O'Reilly book.

To get the most out of this book, you'll want to be familiar with Object Oriented programming in Perl, because (with the exception of LWP::Simple) all the modules discussed in this book use objects.

Also, don't expect the LWP sample code in the book to work correctly. Many of the sites that the scripts try to "scrape" have changed their layout since this book was published, braking the scripts. This isn't a problem though, because the samples Sean provides are very short and clear, so it's not necessary to run them in order to figure out how they work.

Disclaimer: The author is an online-type-friend and I used to work with the author of the foreword. I even got my copy for free.

If the above hasn't totally disqualified me from commenting, I just wanted to note some things most reviewers have ignored.

The book is an excellent resource for two kinds of people.

Many people scan technical books looking for little scripts and thingies; a few lines changed and BOOM! They have the program they always wanted. Sean provides those in abundance.

It is also a good resource for a complete novice to learn about the hodgepodge of technologies we call the web - the ... wire protocol, markup languages, tree-based parsers, and encodings, to name just a few. The author is an expert in all of these, but has restrained himself to provide just enough information to get a programmer going. I was impressed time and again with how he manages to give the reader exactly enough knowledge to get their tasks done, with short but accurate explanations and pointers on where to learn more.

Best of all, this is a funny technical book. Usually if a technical book has pretensions to humor, it jabs you in the arm repeatedly with lots of groaner puns and dumb cartoons, in order to fill the space between bland code sections. But Sean has sprinkled the *code sections* with his dada sense of humor, which also highlights the difference between mere placeholder data and the concept being illustrated. And then the text gets right back to the point.

This is a slim work (242 pages, no thicker than my thumb) but packs a lot of value for your money. So buy it already.

My only criticism is that it is exclusively focused on consuming services on the web - like downloading TV listings and so on. But you can use everything Sean talks about to also *publish* information; for instance, making some nifty Perl-based thing to update your online journal from MS Word or something. Or to aggregate information that's out there, and feed it back onto the web. Nevertheless, if you've got half a brain it will be obvious how to do this stuff once you've absorbed everything you'll get from this book.

The book is written in the style made popular by _A Season on the Brink_ and other books by John Feinstein. (BTW, _A Civil War_ is Feinstein's best.)

But the author goes Feinstein one better with some good insights into the nature of golf and how the PGA Tour is so different from the other major sports.

Toledo is a very interesting person. He grew up essentially as an orphan in Mexico but was able to make the Tour.

I liked his progress reports at the end of each chapter.

The author presents a well written and compelling narrative of the dreams and struggles of PGA Tour professional Esteban Toledo. Read this book if you are interested in the day-to-day life of a touring golf professional. I was, however, continuously distracted by the poor editing of the book. There are so many editing mistakes that by the end of the book the reader is simply insulted by the lack of care that apparently went into publishing the author's excellent work.

This book contains an excellent story and very well paced.It follows Esteban Toledo from his PGA tour qualification to the tour as he plays in a variety of tournaments, covering his practise habits, his earlier life, his caddy, the playing partners and family. The year seems to pass in front of the reader giving insights into variety of aspects of professional golf players.

A hard to put down book.

This book was written by a scientist and a journalist yet it was never clear to me what the contribution of the journalist was. The book writing showed knowledge, but not skills. The few attempts to make the reading captivating felt forced.

The content was great however and it was never tedious. It is just that some books really get you captivated regardless of the topic and this is not one of those books.

I wish it had covered a bit more about the different types of mosquitoes, and a bit more about their lives (only first 2 or 3 chapters do so). But it is still a worthwhile read. It talks a lot about the deadly diseases that are spread by mosquitoes and humans' long lasting battle against them.

This book is a must for students of history and disease,
natural history, and popular history. It is especially timely in
light of the spread of the West Nile virus and can help the
reader to understand humanity's long struggle with disease
and the agents that can carry it. Well-written and informative, it reads more like a novel and is the very best
kind of popular history. Buy it - you'll like it!

I bought this book because I liked the other Finney novels. This was dissappointing. He is reaching for his alternative worlds. The concepts are great, but the execution is weaker than his other books. I still like Finney, and I guess I can tell him that if I can get the damn time machine to work on schedule.

I've read several other Jack Finney novels. I think he has a wonderful imagination and terrific style, and I particularly like his dialogue -- witty and natural-sounding.

I thought these three stories were of mixed quality: The Woodrow Wilson Dime and Marion's Wall were excellent. The Woodrow Wilson dime is particularly good, examining the many outcomes possible from simple actions. But I thought Finney was slightly less successful with The Night People. His characters were likeable, but ultimately their actions were not believable.

That said, though, I would re-emphasize that Finney is a fine writer, and even the weakest novel here is better than many other novelists' work. And the two stronger novels are highly entertaining. And what a bargain -- three Finney works in one volume!

Jack Finney is probably best known for his story "The Body Snatchers" which was made into a movie and for his time travel adventure "Time And Again" which acquired a cult following. But, as we can see in "Three By Finney" it is his unique imagination that gives all of his stories a glow and a charm all their own. Proof of his gift is that his books have become movies. One of the three stories in this book, "Marion's Wall" was made into a movie called "Roxie" that starred actress Glenn Close in the title role. Roxie ("Marion" in the book) is a flapper whose movie career (in the early days of Hollywood) was aborted by a car accident. Roxie returns as a ghost to take up where she left off and causes all kinds of fun and confusion. A second story is about time-travel again; "The Woodrow Wilson Dime" is a tale of a man venturing back and forth in time and you'll love the varying versions of his life that are caused by his travels in time. The last of the three stories is a fanciful account of the adventures of two married couples who take to the streets of San Francisco at night to do all kinds of mischief. This story is so bizarre, funny, and wild that only Finney could have thought of it. Amazon lists a number of books by Jack Finney and every one of them is a good read; naturally some are better than others. When you are a person who reads a lot, as I am, and you find an author as gifted and interesting as Finney, you get the feeling a prospector must have when he discovers a big pocket of gold. Some authors - like the two people who wrote (separately) "To Kill A Mockingbird" and "The Sand Pebbles" - only wrote one book. While you love those books, you are forever disappointed that the authors never wrote more. But an author like Finney, who left us with a number of well-written, imaginative stories, is a mother-lode for those new readers who have not yet discovered him.

D'Antonio is clearly an excellent writer but he relies too much on a prevalent sinister attitude as portrayed to him by a few "legends in their own minds" at the Hanford Reservation. The "whistleblowers" he interviews are clearly so caught up in their own personna that we have to be reminded that these "experts" have no college degrees and are going up against PHD's. Yes it is clear that there were mistakes made in the past before adequate safety measures were observed, but D'Antonio seizes on exploiting what he perceives as secrecy as evil and sinister.

...My father is a retired nuclear engineer who spent a majority of his career working as a project manager for three of the "area" contractors. My mother was a staunch pro-nuclear advocate who directed a grassroots organization called W.A.V.E.- Washington Voices for Energy. Now they're both voicing concerns over the information that has recently come to light regarding past practices at Hanford. Their concerns are based on solid knowledge and the cause & effect results of nuclear industry practices. Many of these concerns, especially the plight of the downwinders, are addressed in this book. Atomic Harvest is well written, and gives a personal voice to the peole afflicted by the heinous acts perpetrated by the nuclear industry. Some of these people are personal friends of my family. In an age where government conspiracy theories are rampant it's easy to say this book is just another example of history blown out of proportion. It's not, and the truth hurts! I'd like to see D'Antonio write more books. It would be interesting to read his take on the current waste management fiasco in the Tri Cities. I'd also like to read more about the Yucca Mountain situation.

I live in the Hanford area of Washington State. I did not appreciate Michael D'Antonio's portrayal of the surrounding communities as uneducated and ignorant. We have some of the finest schools in the area and some of the most stringent regulations to control and regulate wastes. The author tries to paint a pictures of whistleblowers as prophets when generally they are just loud mouthes who crave attention and want their day on the spotlight.

What an awful way to die. In spite of his warnings to his children over the last fourteen years about how unsafe the slurry pit is, farmer Guy Beardon somehow drowned in the disgusting muck. His twenty-year old daughter Lilah, who discovered the body, is stunned by the tragedy as is her brother and mother. Police officer Denholm Cooper rules the death was caused by a nasty accident.

Two more related deaths follow, which leads Cooper to reassess his original position. Someone apparently is out to get the Beardens and anyone associated with the family. Den, who is beginning to fall in love with Lilah, starts making inquiries. Several suspects surface who loathed Guy, and the culprit will murder again if necessary to protect his or her identity.

A DIRTY DEATH is an intriguing English rural police procedural novel that will entertain sub-genre fans especially with its insight into modern farming. The story line is interesting although careless editing hurts it at times. Lilah, Den, and Guy come across as fully developed charcaters, but the rest of the cast seems flat. Still, Rebecca Tope shows much talent that will encourage readers to want to obtain future novels by her.

Harriet Klausner

I gave myself enough time to review with this book, but it didn't help me at all. I wound up desperately searching for my old school notes to help me understand what the book was trying to explain. I struggled to absorb the information in the book because there was so much of it, and after I took the test I found out that most of it was extraneous. I got a 630 on the test, and while that isn't a terrible score, I bought the book in hopes of working up to somewhere near a 700. I could have gotten a 630 on my own, without wasting my money on this book.
There has to be a better review book than this. Try as hard as you can to find something else.

I've been teaching SAT and SAT II courses professionally for around 5 years, and I can honestly say that this title was one of the least-popular and least-helpful books I have EVER used. The title (or sub-title) of the book states that this is the most comprehensive title available -- that's the problem. It's far TOO comprehensive. It includes lots and lots of information that has never been on the test, and that is very unlikely to appear on the test in the future. (If you learn EVERY word in the dictionary, you're sure to get a good verbal score on the SAT, but there are FAR more effective ways to INTELLIGENTLY improve your vocabulary!) To make matters worse, it seems to have been written BY math lovers FOR math lovers and is nearly incomprehensible to someone who's not a math lover. Hey, if you love math, then you don't need a prep book for the SAT II in the first place! The book has way too much information to absorb, the practice tests are unrealistically difficult, and there's no easy way to use only selected portions of the book (for an abbreviated prep based upon the most important concepts, for example). This book feels like a desk reference for mathematics, not a study guide.

In my classes and tutoring, I've found that the books by the big test prep companies (Princeton Review and Kaplan) are concise, accurate, and logically arranged. If forced to choose, I give the Princeton Review title a slight edge above the Kaplan book, but both are excellent titles. I suggest getting both the Princeton Review and the Kaplan titles -- compared to a prep course or college tuition, they're an amazingly inexpensive investment.

How much did I dislike this book? After reading the title, I bought a dozen of them to use with my students -- but after using it for one group of students, I ended up shipping all of the unused copies back. These criticisms apply to both the Math IC and IIC books -- I don't know about the rest of the books for the other subject tests.

No software can be found on the DVD. Just a useless book. Basic info that you can find from sun site already.
Contact author and publisher trying to get the new DVD with softwares and codes that the book said it has.

No one reply.

The table of contents and the DVD are very attractive at the first glance. However, I find that this book is poorly organized and all the materials are just copying from the SUN web site.

This book claims that the evaluation copies of SUN ONE application server, SUN ONE web server and Sun One directory server can be found in the DVD. However, I cannot find these softwares in this DVD, but only a bundle of useless code and installation guide.